Men in white

And now, the explanation of that picture.
When Sun acquired StorageTek, it added a number of technologies, competencies, and lines of business to its portfolio, and many of these were completely new to Sun. A simple example: Sun is now a developer and vendor of mainframe peripherals and software. We have developers in Louisville, Woking, and Canberra, working on a code base of hundreds of thousands of lines of IBM Assembler and C. (Don’t knock it: this is a really good business to be in.)
In order to give Sun’s leading technologists a more detailed view of the full range of technologies that StorageTek brings to the table, we organized a meeting of TAC in Louisville last Friday. (TAC is a body chaired by Greg Papadopoulos, Sun’s Chief Technology Officer, and includes the CTOs from the various lines of business – software, servers, service, etc. – as well as the Sun Fellows. “High powered” doesn’t even begin to describe it!) In addition to presentations and discussions on various hardware and software programs, we took the TAC members to see another capability that StorageTek brings to Sun: microelectronic manufacturing.
StorageTek (now Sun) has always been one of the cutting-edge developers of tape storage systems, and at the densities and speeds we’re talking about you can no longer rely on commodity components. There are no standards (for servo patterns, encoding schemes, and so forth); you have to do it yourself. Even the tape media is specially formulated for each system. As a result, we design and manufacture thin-film read/write heads in our own facility. It’s not quite the same as semiconductor manufacturing – we’re dealing with exotic cocktails of metals designed to tune the magnetic properties of various components – but there are many similarities. In particular, the plant is divided into three zones, including “clean room” and “nearly clean”. (My colleagues can correct my terminology!)
Because of our tight schedule, we decided not to tour the clean room itself, although it would have been delightful to see some of my colleagues in full “bunny suits”. Instead we toured the “nearly clean” area, which only requires hair nets, beard nets, booties, smocks, and safety glasses. We split up into three groups for the tour. Here’s my group, just about ready to go:
group 1
And here’s another group, including Greg Papadopoulos. (Picture by Jim Hughes):
group 2
You can see all the pictures here in my gallery. Although I only took pictures while we were suited up, it’s worth mentioning that some of the most fascinating material came later, when we saw just how you go about debugging the design of such a component. (Hint: it’s relatively easy to contain electric current – insulators work pretty well – but it’s remarkably difficult to make a magnetic field do what you want it to.)
Many thanks to Richard Dee and the staff of the thin film facility for their time and knowledge.

On standing up against those who oppose reason

More and more ordinary people – not pundits, columnists or politicians – are speaking up in defence of the values of the Enlightenment. This time it’s Adam Bosworth: “It is time to say that facts are what matter, not faith, that human progress is accomplished through unfettered use of reason and inquiry and tolerance and discussion and debate, not through intolerant and irrational acts of terror or edicts.”

(Via Loosely Coupled.)

Alexander Hamilton on Harriet Miers

Andrew Sullivan has dug up a wonderful passage by Alexander Hamilton from the Federalist Papers (no.76). Hamilton’s subject: the role of the Senate in confirming Presidential appointments:

“To what purpose then require the co-operation of the Senate? I answer, that the necessity of their concurrence would have a powerful, though, in general, a silent operation. It would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity.”

Read the whole thing. As Sully points out, “Someone who needs a ‘crash course’ on constitutional law should not be selected to be a Supreme Court Justice”.

Selective quotation

As I was finishing up my last blog entry, I decided to link the final word to Pastor Niemöller’s famous “First they came…” quotation. And I stumbled across a page on Niemöller at Liverpool Community College which not only gives the quotation but points out the revealing way in which people have misquoted it over the years – not just casually, but in speeches, and even in memorial inscriptions.

Everbody loves to quote Martin Niemöller’s lines about moral failure in the face of the Holocaust: ‘First they came for the Communists, but I was not a Communist, so I said nothing. Then they came for the Social Democrats, but I was not a Social Democrat, so I did nothing. Then came the trade unionists, but I was not a trade unionist. And then they came for the Jews, but I was not a Jew, so I did little. Then when they came for me, there was no one left to stand up for me.’

But interestingly, people use the quotation to imply different meanings – even altering it to suit their purpose. When Time magazine used the quotation, they moved the Jews to the first place and dropped both the communists and the social democrats. American Vice-President Al Gore likes to quote the lines, but drops the trade unionists for good measure. Gore and Time also added Roman Catholics, who weren’t on Niemöller’s list at all. In the heavily Catholic city of Boston, Catholics were added to the quotation inscribed on its Holocaust memorial. The US Holocaust Museum drops the Communists but not the Social Democrats; other versions have added homosexuals.

What could make Niemöller’s point more eloquently than this selectivity? UPDATE Wikipedia gives the original German text and some of the variations.

If you want to be an historian…

In Salon today, Charles Taylor reviews Deborah Lipstadt’s new book History on Trial, her account of the libel case brought against her by the Holocaust denier and Nazi sympathizer David Irving. Taylor is particularly interested in the way that some historians continued to support Irving even after his fraud and mendacity had been laid bare for all to see. Money quote:

What seems to bother Irving’s defenders is the very notion of professional and intellectual accountability. Running into Lipstadt after the trial, [British historian, Donald Cameron Watt] said to her, ‘None of us could have withstood that kind of scrutiny.’ In a column for the Evening Standard, he said, ‘Show me one historian who has not broken out into a cold sweat at the thought of undergoing similar treatment.’ What Lipstadt was perhaps too polite to say to Watt was that any historian who wishes to be worthy of the title had damn well better be able to withstand that kind of scrutiny.